Help Us Preserve the Einstein's Software and Find What Was Lost

This month a reader sent us eighty five disc images. Most of the programs on them were already in the library. The discs were worth every minute all the same, and that is the point of this article.

What Was on the Discs That Was Not in the Directory

An Einstein disc is forty tracks of ten sectors, and the directory is just a list of which sectors belong to which name. Delete a file and the list changes by one byte; the sectors keep their contents until something else needs the room, which is often never. Copy a finished program over an unfinished one and the old version is still there underneath. So a disc whose DIR shows a game we have had since 2024 can still hold things nobody has seen since 1985. From this one batch, with the full stories to follow over the coming weeks:

• A pre production build of Space Trap, deleted beneath the released game, with the letter from Gem Software that came with it.
• A full screen file manager for XtalDOS that Peter Amey offered Tatung in January 1985, deleted from a Konami demonstration disc with his covering letter.
• Tatung’s own drive calibration program, in an earlier version with its author’s name, deleted beside the later one.
• A disassembly of the XtalDOS command processor, deleted on a plain system disc, which told us things about the DOS that no manual does.
• A text adventure its author never released, the source of a word processor, a listing of CP/M for the Einstein that somebody annotated and then erased.

None of that was in any directory. All of it was on discs whose live contents we mostly had.

You Already Have the Tool

We image discs here by reading the flux with a Greaseweazle, and for protected originals that is the only way. But most discs are not protected, and for those the Einstein can image itself. The BACKUP command on every System Master copies a disc sector by sector, directory or no directory, and if the destination is a Gotek it writes the copy straight into an image file on the USB stick. We checked the result against the original in an emulator: four hundred sectors, all identical, deleted files and all.

So if you have an Einstein, a Gotek and a box of discs, you can do what our reader did without any other hardware. The guide Dump a Disc With Nothing but a Gotek has the seven steps and a blank image to write into. It takes about a minute a disc.

What Would Help Most

Anything at all. Commercial games you are sure we have, system masters, blank looking discs, the ones with a hand written label that means nothing to you now, the ones that will not boot. A disc that fails to BACKUP is interesting in itself, because the failure usually means protection, and we will arrange a flux read of those. Name each image after the label, tell us whose collection it came from if you know, and if a disc was somebody’s personal one say so; we look for personal data before anything goes anywhere, and we take it out.

In return you get the finds. Every disc that turns up something gets a story on this site, with the disc hosted as it was read and the contributor credited if they want to be. The eighty five discs this month gave us six articles and forty new library entries. Whatever your box holds, sharing it is a real favour to everyone who still cares about this machine, and it is how its software survives.

How to Share Them

There is now an upload page: Share Your Disc Images takes .DSK files from a Gotek, and .MFI and .SCP files from a Greaseweazle, straight from your browser, up to forty at a time, with no account to make. Each file is checked as a real disc image before it is accepted, and they land in a private folder, not on the site. If you would rather, the contact page still works. Thank you.